The first day of this year's world tournament was yesterday. If you missed the fun, there are some choice games online that you can watch on YouTube or Twitch. A game in which last year's world champion, Wolfe Glick, was flinch haxed by Rock Slide three times set the tone for this year's troll-meme: "Rock Slide was the play for Worlds," and similar quips.

I just finished watching Day 2 Swiss Round 2, Markus Stadter vs. Ryuuzaburo H. It was incredibly exciting to watch, though perhaps not for the right reasons ... ^^;;

RiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiDICulous amounts of freeze hax and other hax in general.

We're moving on to Day 2 Swiss Round 3 right now. The main channel is streaming TCG matches, though I imagine it will be streaming VGC matches soon. But you can use the backup, VGC-dedicated channel to catch the live matches that are being streamed for us at home.

Ducking in without reading any of the replies made since Saturday of last week just to report:

I've been watching the Twitch recordings, bit by slow bit, over the past week

currently at 10:46:07 of the "Day 1" (Day 2) video, just finished watching the first match of the Top 16

The Twitch chat is a recording of the comments as they were posted that day, which is pretty fucking neat. It means I don't get spoiled on anything before it would have been known to the people watching the event live a week ago. I do get "spoiled" on a thing or two, but they all have to do with off-camera matches that are taking place at the same time as the on-camera ones. The chat has just revealed something, so I'll go ahead and comment on it before ducking back out of this thread until I get further caught up on the games:

Apparently Wolfe Glick lost to Nils Dunlop in the Round of 16. This game was taking place concurrent to the one I watched, which was Satoshi vs. Ryouta also in the Round of 16.

So the dream ends once again. The dream of a consecutive-years world champion. The dream of a two-time world champion picking any two years. Once again, Ray Rizzo remains the only person in Pokémon history to have won consecutive Worlds, let alone to have won three of them.

It would have been nice if Wolfe could have pulled off a win, but by all accounts I'm hearing this year just wasn't his year. Between school, the format, and other factors, I guess his performance in the 2017 season just wasn't anything like what you would've expected from someone set to win the world championship next year.

I still have no idea who wins this, but I have to say that from what I am seeing so far, Top Cut 2017 is one of the most exciting and delightful top cuts to watch in memory. I don't think the overall season was as fun or as memorable as VGC 2014 was, but the Top Cut at Worlds bears an awful lot of similarities to it. Lots of little quirks and varieties. One guy brings a Krookodile and does really well with it ... one guy brings a Mandibuzz and does really well with it ... You do see the same Pokémon a lot -- the four Tapus, Celesteela, Kartana, Snorlax, Arcanine -- but there's enough variety afoot to prevent me from really discussing "cores". You don't see the same cores, necessarily. Or if you do, they're cores only two Pokémon big. You don't reliably see the same four or five Pokémon showing up on every single team that made Top Cut. This is a refreshing change of pace from VGC 2015 and 2016. Throughout the season, both of those formats were pretty homogenous. And even at Worlds, VGC 2015 was homogenous while VGC 2016 was little more than a Paper-Rock-Scissors match between Double Primals, Rayogre, and the third one. But VGC 2017, I honestly cannot say yet who I think is going to take home the trophy. Every one of these trainers is battling really well. And every one of them has enough tech variations to make the matches exciting and different.

I think that's a big part of the reason why I haven't skipped ahead to the championship match this year, whereas in previous years I have done precisely that. I didn't watch all of Top Cut 2016. And I sure as hell didn't watch all of Top Cut 2015. But Top Cut 2017 is interesting enough that I am having fun watching the games, each of the games, even if it's taken me ten hours and forty-six minutes so far to get to where I am.